


Old Flames

by 13atoms (2Atoms)



Series: Count Orlo (Oneshots) [4]
Category: The Great (TV 2020)
Genre: F/M, Forgiveness, I-Broke-Your-Heart-As-A-Teenager-to-Lovers, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:54:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24727066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2Atoms/pseuds/13atoms
Summary: After learning about Catherine's attempt to seduce Orlo, you find jealousy reopens old wounds.
Relationships: Count Orlo / Reader
Series: Count Orlo (Oneshots) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1770073
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	Old Flames

Although it was expressly forbidden, you’d still sneak Marial to your room to have dinner with you. You had hated to see your friend fall from grace in the eyes of the court – frankly she was one of your favourite people here. A bit of good company and a hot meal was the least you could offer her.

Lately, as she enjoyed the luxurious foods she was now sorely missing as a servant, she would regale you with the tales of working with the new Empress, Catherine. You had only met the woman a few times (and had frankly thought her a little rude, she didn’t seem to like you) but you did admire her spirit.

The woman in the stories Marial told you was firey, naïve and wise in equal, perplexing measure, and you had to admit you admired her more with every tale.

Sworn to secrecy, she’d drunkly told you about Catherine’s plans.

Perhaps, when the time came, you could fight alongside her. Not now, though. She had nothing more than an idea and a single servant on her side – although expansion of her group seemed to be on the Empress’ mind.

“She wants _Orlo_ , of all people!”

“Could be worse.”

“I know, I know. I just don’t think he’s… coup-material.”

Count Orlo was a childhood friend of yours, and you held old memories of him close to your heart. To have Orlo grow apart from you over the years had broken your heart beyond recognition. But even through the personal problems between you, it was obvious that if anyone had the mind for a coup, the vision, it was Orlo.

The taunts of ‘virgin’ slung across dining halls at him always made you giggle. He never mentioned it to anyone, least of all you, but you’d been his first in clumsy adolescence. Unable to meet your eye in the corridor, you knew he remembered the early, unformed version of love you’d shared in your younger years. Even being at odds with the man now, you would still defend him.

“I think he would surprise you, probably. He hides his true self a lot, I think.”

“You’ve seen plenty of him, as I recall?” Marial teased.

“Shut up.”

You swatted at her arm, laughing to smother the pain, the tender spot Marial had stabbed at in your heart. Things would be easier, if you didn’t still miss him so dearly, but it was a pain you were at peace with.

“It was years ago.”

He was not yours.

“You should talk to him more, you know. He strikes me as lonely.”

You hummed, taking another sip at your drink before you answered her.

“He has no want to talk to me. And I have nothing to say to him.”

“I don’t think that’s true. He’s just nervous around women. Even Catherine.”

Especially Catherine, you should imagine. Her youthful beauty had been the chatter of the court since she had arrived, and her learnedness likely rivalled the Count’s.

“I sent her to seduce him, you know,” she casually informed you. “Tonight. He refused to join her plans earlier, when she asked outright, but I thought she could win him over if she let him fuck her. That pretty face ought to be useful for something, after all. Told her to eat some oysters, bat her eyelashes, show some cleavage. He’ll be a convert by tomorrow.”

You struggled to process what you were hearing, choosing to blame the alcohol for the sudden dryness in your throat.

“So that’s why you made yourself scarce, I suppose.” You choked out.

“Indeed.”

She turned to look at the clock on your mantelpiece, tutting.

“He should be there by now.”

You followed her gaze to the time, before glumly looking back down at your glass. You no longer felt jolly enough to drink. All you could imagine was Orlo on top of the Empress, visions of him being stunned to stuttering and compliance by her beauty.

It stung.

“Well, good luck to her.”

Even to your ears, the words sounded bitter. You could see the frown of Marial’s eyebrows in your peripheral vision, and you pretended not to see her, gave her no recognition.

“Oh my god, you still want him!”

You exhaled slowly, fighting the urge to hide your face. Strangely, it felt nice to admit.

“I wish I didn’t.”

“Perhaps he will reject Catherine,” she offered, “he hasn’t seemed partial to taking strangers before.”

Even with the truth of that, his rejection of the Empress seemed impossible. You wondered if her prettiness, her brains, her power, could be anything but aphrodisiac to Orlo. Despite what some of the court believed, he was hot-blooded, certainly an appreciator of beautiful women. Even if his reported actions did not reflect that to date.

Perhaps the Empress possessed whatever it was you lacked. Caught up in your melancholy, the clink of Marial’s empty glass on the table brought you back to the room.

“Can you imagine him and Catherine?” her laugh was sharp, even with the fuzziness vodka induced.

“I am really trying not to,” you groaned.

“She’s so much taller than him, it would be hilarious. She is inexperienced, too. The pair of them in bed together would be a travesty. I’m not sure who would lay stiller.”

A grimace was the most you could manage, gaining no pleasure from the image or the way she spoke about Orlo. Marial’s face fell.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m sorry for being so… un-fun about it. I just really…”

As you stumbled over your words, Marial readied herself to leave again, pulling her much-hated work shoes back on. You knew she had to attend to the Empress, but she stayed a moment longer.

“Its okay,” she promised, putting you out of your misery. “He means something to you.”

“He was my first.”

From Marial’s pitying smile, you knew she didn’t understand your attachment to Orlo, how much you craved the happy times you’d spent with him. It still hurt, how you’d separated. A single rumour, an argument, and years of attachment were lost. Even when you made up, it was too late. Mutual cordiality and promises to be friends had never really worked for the pair of you. The fire was gone, embers dying after so long untended.

You just didn’t know him anymore.

Marial patted your shoulder as she rose to leave, rushing to get back. The pair of you always spent longer together than she was supposed to. She paused again as she opened the door, looking at your curled in on yourself, shrinking into your chair.

“Just… if you find them together, promise not to tell me?” Your voice broke, tears hot in your eyes.

Marial cocked her head, her expression furrowed with concern like she was observing a wounded animal.

“I promise.”

The door clicked shut.

For the hours after Marial left, the image of Orlo and the Empress wouldn’t leave your mind. You almost regretted making her promise silence. If she had come back, you would at least have the knowledge that it was done.

He really, truly, was not yours.

Perhaps he never had been.

You sat at your desk, contemplating the hours you had spent here, the books you had considered sharing with him, the letters you had agonised over writing him.

In the end, everything you wanted to share with him went unsaid. Each draft of your letters had been crumpled up and set in the fireplace, never to be read by another person’s eyes.

There was a universe of things you wanted to say to Orlo, and you did not possess the skill to compress them into a single paragraph, nor a stanza which would hold a candle to the prose and poetry he devoured on a daily basis. Pride held you back too. And the fear he would not want to hear anything from you.

With a knock, a footman announced his presence. You spoke your permission for him to enter, but didn’t even look up. Melancholy had set in your very joints, something frighteningly close to heartache freezing you in place, banishing your thoughts and movements from straying from this place.

“Count Orlo is outside, my lady.”

Surprise flushed the glum stillness from your system, and you looked up dizzyingly quickly to see a nervous figure silhouetted in the doorway, behind your manservant.

“He can enter.”

The two men swapped places, and you saw Orlo in the light, doors clicked closed behind him. He looked a little more dishevelled than you’d seen him around the palace – vision of a man you did not really know. He was a little better dressed than when you were younger, hair longer, face aged artificially by his glasses and profession.

This adult body still housed the young man you had loved, and you wondered what he saw when he looked back at you. Could he recognise you?

“You would not believe the evening I have had,” he started, tone jovial.

He was wringing his hands, a manifestation of his nervousness which had always endeared him to you.

A tactful manipulator in a meeting, and an anxious little boy elsewhere; he was enigmatic, in that regard.

“I think I might believe it, actually.”

You tried not to snap at him, but it was hard. Second nature, at this point, was to try and distance yourself from him. Even as you longed to hear his breathy, intimate tone again, you wanted in equal measure to make him to shout from anger.

To _hurt_.

“Can I help you with something?”

 _Why are you here?_ Was the implied question you desperately wanted him to answer. You prayed it was not related to Catherine. The blank gaps in the story of the night were infuriating, each scenario you considered hurting more than the last.

“Marial spoke with me earlier,” he confessed.

The first words of that story seemed to be all he could divulge, and he just stood there, still wringing his fucking hands, staring at you.

“Before or after you fucked Catherine, I wonder?”

His hands stilled.

“I never even touched Catherine, before you start _rumours_.”

You laughed hollowly.

“I am not the one who spreads rumours, Orlo.”

Barely a second passed for him to register what you had said, and you could see the haunting regret which passed over his features. As you’d hoped, he still remembered with startling clarity.

It was a single incident which broke your trajectories apart, instigated by a few clumsy words from Orlo. You hadn’t heard him gossip since, so much was his life changed by a moment of stupid bragging to another young member of the court.

Desperate to seem _casual_ , to fit in, he’d destroyed you with the very mastery of language you’d fallen for.

His exact words never made it back to you, just their destructive ripples. Even older residents of the palace had known, mocked you. Orlo had bragged that he was fucking you only because you were stupid enough to fall in love with him.

He felt nothing in return, he had boasted.

The pain he’d caused you was unlike anything you had experienced before, that trust built in the sanctified ground of your beds shattered. He had made you second guess everything about yourself, pick apart everything he’d ever said to you. Without an apology, he had simply hidden from you, brushed off the rumours as false to save face, accepting the praise of the then-Emperor’s son, Peter, and his stupid friends. One clumsy play for repute, and he’d destroyed everything.

“I don’t believe I ever apologised for that, not to the extent I should have.”

“It is _far_ too late.”

You knew he had been young, stupid, both of you too hard-headed to ever talk it though. He’d been a near-monk since, crying over his romance books alone, throwing himself into stories and philosophy and politics.

All of his wisdom, all his knowledge, and he’d never looked inwards, or backwards. Never apologised.

“Did Marial tell you anything?” he mumbled.

“She told me what Catherine had planned.”

“Her design for the evening never played out, I promise.”

You shrugged your indifference petulantly, playing with letters on your desk, just for something to do with your hands.

“I have never found myself able to take another, since you.”

When you looked up, he had crept closer to you. Your gaze had him terrified, frozen to the spot.

“My apologies, then.” You told him dryly.

“When we ruined everything… it broke me a little, I fear.”

“You ruined everything. Do _not_ pin this on me.”

He bowed his head, and for a second you could imagine yourselves years younger, having this discussion at the age you ought to have. Before you spent years holding distance between you, repelled from each other. It had taken this long for a scab to form over the wound he had caused you, an injury which stubbornly refused to heal.

“I wrote to you, I apologised a thousand times over, don’t you remember?”

You had completely forgotten, until his words. A small measure of guilt burnt in you, and you let your gaze flicker to the roaring fire, which kept out the freezing Russian winter.

“I saw your handwriting, and I burnt them. Every letter.”

The satisfaction you felt was shameful, but hurt on his face burned through you like redemption. Like some measure of equality to the pain you had felt.

“You never read a single one of them?”

With a shake of your head, he stumbled back from you, falling back to sit on your bed.

“I poured my heart into those letters.”

Even with the time that had passed, you suspected the sadness he felt was not just for an adolescent Orlo, but for himself too.

“What did they say?”

He swallowed, before he spoke.

“A lot. Mainly, that I was wrong to say those things. That they were untrue. That regardless of whether you really did love me, I loved you back tenfold.”

“Wow.”

His words seemed to bring him pain, but he had no issue recalling them. You felt an ache settle into your head, the tightness which precedes tears, as a silence fell between you. The thought of the words you had thrown unread into flames, the idea of him crouched over a desk, desperately trying to figure out the love letter which could redeem him and translate it into ink and parchment, made you ache for simpler times.

Regret stronger than you had ever felt it was coursing through you. You wished you could read those letters, save them forever from the flames.

“You couldn’t tell me in person? After all you told to other people, you couldn’t speak to me?”

“I was afraid. Young. Stupid.” He admitted.

“As was I.”

The thickness in his voice matched yours, and you knew the pair of you would cry once he left here.

With so much more to be said, you couldn’t begin to say it. Orlo leant forwards, fractionally closer to you but making you feel he was in your space, holding your whole attention.

“Can we spend some time together tomorrow, just the two of us? We can do whatever you want.”

For the first time since Marial had broken the news, you felt yourself smiling, just a little, with sincerity.

“I’ve really missed you,” he admitted.

“How does breakfast here sound?”

“It sounds perfect.” He beamed, like a complete dork, and you tried to fight down the giddiness you felt in your stomach at the sight.

“I will bid you goodnight, then. I really can’t wait.”

You smiled as he gave you a gentle smile and moved to the door, before a sudden thought crossed your mind.

“Orlo?”

“Yes?”

He paused, as a certain servant had earlier that evening, and realisation hit you full force.

“Why did you come here in the first place?”

“Marial told me you wanted to see me.”

You’d kill her for this, of course. Once you managed to stop blushing like a teenager.


End file.
